Industry session speakers
Oscar Boykin, Ph.D., is a Staff Software Engineer at Twitter. He is co-author of Scalding, Twitter's library for large-scale Hadoop programming. At Twitter, he is building systems for real-time Big Data with applications to ad targeting. Before joining Twitter, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in Electrical and Computer Engineering where his research was focused on large-scale distributed systems.
Abstract We are exploring the close integration of emerging solid-state storage technologies in conjunction with high performance networks and integrated processing capability. Specifically, we consider the extension of the Blue Gene/Q architecture by integrating Flash into the node to enable a scalable, data-centric computing platform. We are using BG/Q as a rapid prototyping platform allowing us to build a research system based on an infrastructure with proven scalability to thousands of nodes. Our work also involves enabling a Linux environment with standard network interfaces on the BG/Q hardware. We plan to explore applications of this system architecture including existing file systems and middleware as well as more aggressive compute-in-storage approaches. This presentation will review the architectural extension to BG/Q, present a progress report on the project, and describe some early results.
Blake G. Fitch joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1985 as an student. After receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Antioch College in 1987, he remained on to pursue interests in parallel systems. In 1990 he joined the Scalable Parallel Systems group, contributing to the research and development that culminated in the IBM scalable parallel system (SP) product. Since then, his research interests have focused on application frameworks and programming models suitable for production parallel computing environments. Practical application of this work includes contributions to the transputer based control system for IBM's CMOS S/390 mainframes (IBM Boeblingen, Germany 1994) and the architecture of IBM's Automatic Fingerprint Identification System parallel application (IBM Hursley, UK, 1996). In 1999, he joined the Blue Gene Project as the application architect for BlueMatter, a scalable molecular dynamics package. Mr. Fitch is currently a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research and is the architect and technical lead for the Active Storage project. The Active Storage project aims to integrate non-volatile memory into a highly scalable parallel system architecture (currently IBM Blue Gene/Q) and to explore system software and applications that leverage the new capabilities of such systems.
Paolo Costa is a researcher in the Systems and Networking Group of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge. He also holds a position as senior research investigator with the Department of Computing of Imperial College London. In the past, he had been a research faculty at Imperial College and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Systems group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He holds a M. Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano. His research interests lie at the intersection of systems and networking with particular emphasis on large-scale networked systems, ranging from sensor and mobile networks to overlay networks and data centers. His current research focuses on providing a better integration and synergy between applications and networks in data centers to improve performance and reduce complexity.